From keeping time to serving time
Rethinking our transactional conception of time
The present tears at the past as if living
were something the mind could ever hold.
—Marge Piercy, “The Hunger Moon”
Welcome to Sunday Notes — a space where I gather threads of art, literature, film and philosophy to metabolize meaning in this chaotic and wondrous universe. You are receiving this because you subscribed to Poetry Notes. If this isn’t for you, feel free to unsubscribe. I’m grateful for your participation on my poetic meditations last year. If you enjoy this or find it interesting, please share.
I want to launch this substack with ruminating on time and space. I am acutely aware of time and timing; it’s omnipresent in my thoughts. Space, or spaces and environments, capture my attention. How spaces are utilized, what fills them, and the emotions they engender occupy my attention more than I would like to admit. If I’m not careful, I can spend inordinate amounts of time tinkering with the spaces I inhabit.
Conceptions of time in modern Western culture are steeped in an economic framework we can’t escape because of global technology and social structures. Even the language we use to describe time and attention is commercial; we “pay attention” and “spend time.” Even the cliché “time is our most precious resource” connotes extraction. This use of transactional language reveals the pervasive role of capitalism in our lives even when it comes to an aspect of existence we all share and experience.
A hundred and twenty years ago Einstein’s revolutionary theory of relativity revealed that space and time are entangled and relative — that our experience is unique and individual. 46 years after this proposal forever altered our perception of reality Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote The Sabbath arguing that, “life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.” His belief that relinquishing our impulse to dominate space and time one day a week is an antidote to the pressures of life, an experience that reminds us our existence is ephemeral and fleeting.
Humans created our current conceptions of time. Lewis Mumford’s 1934 book Technics and Civilization describes the clock, a 13th-century invention, as “a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes.” He demonstrates shifts in humanity’s relationship to time from time-keepers to time-savers to time-servers. We ignore cycles of nature and circadian rhythms in our bodies in order to be productive and efficient. What are the ethics of living at the center of imperial power where whatever we want is only a click away?1 In our attempts to save time we buy fast fashion, fast food, and drive fast cars. Our habits of consumption are fueled by our need to assert our independence from the constraints of time.2
Is there a way to exist beyond the boundaries of the culture we find ourselves? At the peak of colonial power wealthy Europeans commissioned Vanitas paintings, a genre of memento mori, that served to remind them of the futility of wealth and the transience of life, and the certainty of death.3 They included a skull surrounded by various objects from everyday life in order to demonstrate the reality that life continues long after we cease to exist. Perhaps we need an equivalent of these paintings in contemporary culture today — a visual reminder all our efforts to control space and time are futile.
The time of the rocks is expansive, building intimate, animating connections with other histories and temporalities, connections at once reparative and speculative as they advise us that other worlds are possible.
—Dana Luciano, How the Earth Feels
I am a guilty participant in over-consumption and the waste it produces weighs on my conscience.
The ease of our Western existence comes at the cost of exploitive labor conditions and extractive practices in the Global South.
See the painting at the top of this post for a visual of this type of still life.